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The Discreet Masochism of the Bourgeoisie

TONIGHT, the 43rd New York Film Festival will conclude with Michael Haneke's "Caché" ("Hidden"), a formally dexterous, nerve-rackingly suspenseful movie about parental anxiety, bourgeois bad faith and the fragile, illusory nature of security in the modern world. In it, Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche play Georges and Anne Laurent, a cultured, comfortable and perhaps complacent Parisian couple whose lives are rattled when videotapes and sinister drawings begin arriving on their doorstep.

With their book-lined house, their quietly chic dinner parties and their irreproachably high-toned careers -- she works at a publishing house, while he is the host of a popular literary talk show on television -- Anne and Georges should feel right at home at Lincoln Center. Not only do they represent French social types familiar from past programs (last year's festival opener, "Look at Me," for instance, or any number of selections in the Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual Rendezvous With French Cinema), but they may also provoke a murmur of recognition from the audience. If they lived in New York, that is, the chances are good that Georges and Anne would be in the audience. (And if they lived in Brooklyn, they could be the dysfunctional parents in "The Squid and the Whale," Noah Baumbach's contribution to the festival, which opened in theaters last week.)

In describing himself and his wife, Georges Laurent uses the word "bobo." The term was popularized a few years ago by the conservative social critic David Brooks (now an op-ed columnist for The New York Times), and it gains something in translation, because the upper-middle-class bohemianism it denotes occupies a more secure and visible place in French culture than it does here. In any case, one feature of the sensibility that Mr. Haneke's characters share with the film's likely viewers is a disposition toward masochism. Not as a sexual practice so much as a matter of aesthetics, and perhaps of politics as well. "Caché" takes in lives of privilege and self-satisfaction and gives back punishment. The psychological torments aimed at Anne and Georges seem utterly irrational and unmotivated, the kind of experiences that lead one to ask, "What have I done to deserve this?"

In Mr. Haneke's view, this is not a rhetorical question. Where there is punishment, there must be a crime. In previous movies like "Code Inconnu" and "The Time of the Wolf," he has never been one to grant his characters the presumption of innocence, and their culpability tends to be both individual and collective. He holds to a secular vision of original sin, which is to say, one without a compensatory notion of redemption. Grace is conceivable in small doses -- meager acts of kindness or love that hardly measure up to the enormities of inequality, abused power and unthinking cruelty. Usually, these have at least an implicit political dimension. The secret sin behind the Laurents' benign facade is rooted in France's colonialist past and, more indirectly, its present-day indifference to its immigrant population. (The American literary couple in "The Squid and the Whale," meanwhile, bear no such world-historical stigma; they are guilty only of messing up their kids.)

The stain of racism -- and its refusal to fade from one generation to the next -- is also the subject of Lars von Trier's "Manderlay," which, like "Caché," made the voyage from Cannes to New York. (Both will arrive in American theaters before too long.) Mr. von Trier's cynical view of human nature can make Mr. Haneke look like Frank Capra, and in his latest parable he presents a familiar spectacle of abused innocence. This time, the director conjures up a plantation in the American South where blacks are still held in slavery 70 years after the end of the Civil War. It may be hard to take Mr. von Trier's curious ideas about American history seriously, but like Mr. Haneke, he seems especially interested in turning the sadistic force of his imagination against his presumed audience. On screen, the brunt of his contempt is directed at the film's designated liberal, an authoritarian busybody who meddles where she does not belong.

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Some critics have theorized that "Manderlay" is less about race than about Iraq; in freeing the slaves and trying to reform the plantation's economy, the protagonist, a gangster's daughter named Grace, supposedly represents the arrogance of trying to impose democracy on people who may not want it. It seems more likely that "Manderlay" is a free-swinging assault on political correctness and blue-stocking social engineering wrapped in facile anti-Americanism. In any event it is Grace's moral hubris -- which is to say, her belief in progress, decency and the improvement of society -- that marks her as a hypocrite and a fool.

She is also, like Anne and Georges Laurent, a surrogate for the audience. Not explicitly, of course; she is no bobo. But if the Laurents are intellectuals in the generic, sociological sense of reading the right books and holding the right opinions, Grace, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, is the genuine article. Ruled by ideas, she tries to bring reality into conformity with them, with disastrous consequences that she herself never has to face fully.

But she does suffer, and so do we. The sting of movies like "Manderlay" and "Caché" can have a salutary effect, since the discomfort they provoke, even when it takes the form of defensive anger, is an antidote to the soothing reassurance that we find elsewhere. But the masochistic embrace of art that tries to hit us where we live can provide its own perverse form of comfort. Feeling bad about ourselves can become a way of affirming our own goodness, a sign of moral virtue and political concern that costs nothing more than the price of a ticket.

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A version of this article appears in print on October 9, 2005, on Page 2002013 of the National edition with the headline: FILM; The Discreet Masochism of the Bourgeoisie. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe